On the 15th June 2015 at Loughborough University, we held our first Project Advisory Board meeting for the LiDA project where our advisors came together to hear about project progress thus far and provide guidance and direction for the next steps of our research [click to read more].

Two of the LiDA team attended the ACM CHI 2014 conference at the end of April 2014, presenting a short workshop paper on the project on the first day of the conference [click to read more].

Loneliness in the Digital Age (LiDA) is a 3 year multi-partner, multi-disciplinary, UK national research project which is investigating how people (who find themselves temporarily isolated or disconnected from their close relations and families) experience loneliness, and the role that digital technologies might play in both amplifying and counteracting such experiences. The project involves a combination of primary qualitative and quantitative research on the experiences of specific groups of people identified as ‘at risk’ of loneliness, as well as applied design and human-computer interaction research where new technologies will be prototyped and evaluated. The project is led by Loughborough University in collaboration with partners at the University of Bath, Newcastle University, the University of Exeter, and the University of Lincoln.

LiDA is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), in partnership with Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), and Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) and is one of a cluster of projects funded under the “Empathy and Trust In Communicating Online” (EMoTICON) call.